One of Uber's self-driving test cars struck and killed a pedestrian in March of 2018. A "safety driver" was in the driver seat, as required, but he was not paying attention. It was the first time a pedestrian was ever killed by a self-driving car.
It happened just five days after Robbie Miller (yesterday's post) emailed other Uber executives with a safety warning. He was alarmed that the company’s self-driving test cars were “routinely in accidents resulting in damage” and that collisions occurred “every 15,000 miles.”
Some claim that hundreds of millions of miles of test-driving must be done before we have reliable data about whether self-driving cars are safer than human-driven cars. Yet this kind of testing has only been going on for a few years, amounting to just a few million miles.
One of the best automotive blogs says:
"Automakers have begun leveling with us about vehicular autonomy. After years of promises that self-driving cars were just around the corner, the vision rollback has begun. Testing has taken longer than anticipated and nobody is as close to unleashing a commercial product as they hoped to be."
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